Poor ol’ Phil Scott. After getting repeatedly overridden by the Legislature’s Democratic/Progressive supermajorities, he’s desperate to get more Republicans into the House and Senate.

Not desperate enough to try to build a political movement or exercise influence over the Vermont Republican Party, mind you. But desperate enough to endorse some, shall we say, decidedly fringey characters posing as “common sense” fiscal conservatives.

Take Michael Boutin of Barre, last seen in this space when, as a member of City Council, he cast the sole “No” vote on the sale of Main Street’s Wheelock Building to the owners of East Montpelier’s very successful and LGBTQ+-friendly Fox Market. Boutin had earlier led an unsuccessful petition drive aimed at blocking the sale. Which is truly strange, because Barre’s Main Street can use all the vibrant businesses it can get.

Back in 2021, Boutin maneuvered to block the proposed display of a Black Lives Matter flag in the city’s downtown by offering a charter amendment limiting acceptable flags to four: the Stars and Stripes, the state flag, the city’s flag, and the POW/MIA banner. Boutin shows definite signs of far-right intolerance, I think it’s fair to say.

Boutin is not an altogether bad guy; his Facebook page is full of civic boosterism and pet photos and the occasional foray into Trekdom. But there’s one big strange exception: a video excerpt from a Christian talk show featuring, as the clip’s title puts it, “Christian Professor Disproves the Theory of Evolution.”

Hoo boy. Rabbit hole alert.

The show is called “Hope@Night,” an offering of the rather obscure Hope Channel. The episode can be viewed here, should you wish to; the Christian professor is a Dr. Major Coleman, assistant professor of law at St. Thomas University, a Catholic institution located in Miami, Florida. Coleman claims to hold a fistful of advanced degrees in art, philosophy, and law. None would seem to convey the kind of scientific expertise he peddles in the video, where he is presented as an expert in the scientific truth of creationism.

And yes, the clip is just as batshit as you’d expect. If Boutin’s posting — and he actually posts the same video not once, but twice — can be seen as an endorsement of the views contained therein, well, it’s hard to see him as a Phil Scott-style “moderate” Republican.

Coleman begins by boldly asserting that “Jesus believed in the flood model” which means that Our Lord and Savior was a Young Earther as well. Coleman says the flood model “is the basis for the entire authenticity of the Bible.” He finds it difficult “to understand how you could call yourself a Christian if you don’t understand or accept the story of Noah’s Flood or the creation story.”

There are plenty of Christians who disagree, but I’m sure Coleman would cast doubt on their faith and the fate of their immortal souls.

Coleman’s “proof” that the universe is a mere spratling of 6,000 years is an impenetrable mass of pseudoscientific gobbledygook. He makes four points, which he calls “postulates” to make ’em seem more sciencey. First, he asserts that life must spring from life — that there is no way for “non-life” to engender life, the presumed origin point of the evolutionary process. Second, he casts doubt on the idea that complex life evolved from simple life forms because, while we still have single-cell life, “we have no two cell life forms, we don’t have three cell life forms, we don’t have four cell life forms, we don’t even have five cell life forms.” Missing links, don’t you see.

His third point is that the chance of life evolving is so vanishingly small that it couldn’t possibly have happened, even in the unBiblical scenario of a billions-of-years-old universe. Fourth, he says the theory of genetic diversity leading to evolution is nonsense because, um…

…cats are different colors, dogs are different sizes, that means that fish turned into cows and of course we know that that’s not true because Mendel proved that all the genes that exist today, you can shuffle them around, but there are no new genes that were created.

And then things take a turn for the weird. He claims scientific proof of a young Earth because “What’s the oldest living thing on the planet? Trees. How old are the oldest trees? 4,500 years. That takes us back almost exactly to the year of the flood, okay, in 2500.”

Finally, he ventures into space, which Boutin likely knows as the Final Frontier. Here’s my transcription of Coleman-style astrophysics.

A solar nebula is what we see when a star explodes. It leaves a gas cloud. Because of our radio telescopes that we have now today, we can look deep into space and we can actually count the number of solar nebulae that are there. And how many are there? A supernova takes place about once every 26 years. How many solar nebulae do we have? 6,000 years worth. That’s impossible in a universe that is billions and billions of years old. And we have other evidences such as alpha decay that we do in our program that most people don’t understand that also shows that the Earth is 6,000 years old.

Case closed!

I must emphasize that adherents to creationism and Young Earth “science” are absolutely free to run for office. But voters deserve to be fully informed about the views of candidates seeking their support. When the governor tries to conceal Boutin’s evident extremism behind a constructed façade of “common sense” conservatism, then he is selling the trust he has earned in many voters’ minds for a mess of convenient pottage.